Introduction

The purpose of this document is to facilitate the planning of railway operations between organizations in the transportation sector (communication between interested parties).

The aim is to provide a common format for necessary railway data exchange between interested parties in the industry during the conceptual, strategic and tactical phases of railway service planning.

Examples of roles of interested parties are:

— railway authorities;
— public transport authorities;
— train operators;
— infrastructure managers;
— rolling stock companies;
— suppliers to the railway sector (rolling stock, signalling systems, etc.);
— consultants.

These roles can be fulfilled by separate entities or by different units within one integrated entity or company.

This document covers various planning aspects, including the following:

a) Conceptual planning: Years in advance of construction of the new or improved infrastructure.

b) Strategic planning: Usually for new timetable concepts, new rolling stock or improved infrastructure, more than 15 months before implementation of new annual timetable, including:

— tendering process for passenger train operators (calculating tenders);
— feasibility studies for commercial train operators (freight and passengers);
— temporary infrastructure capacity restrictions.

c) Tactical planning: Usually for producing a new timetable, typically for construction of the annual timetable, including:

— train path and capacity requests (train operators);
— train path and capacity allocation (infrastructure managers).

During planning there is a continuous need for exchange of (machine readable) information between different stakeholders.

These stakeholders use different applications for their internal processes (runtime calculations, rostering, temporary capacity restrictions, etc). Within large organizations there can also be different applications in use, where effective exchange of information is essential.

A common (standardized) format for exchanging information between different applications will reduce time-consuming manual work and will improve accuracy. Railway Data Exchange (RailDax) is a format standard for exchanging railway data between applications.

The RailDax format is intended to be used by railway and transportation authorities, infrastructure managers and train operators during long-term planning, tendering processes, commercial evaluations and the yearly capacity allocation processes leading to the annual timetable.

RailDax has been developed in parallel with the data exchange language railML 2.5 (Railway Modelling Language 2.5), which is managed by railML.org.1

Figure 1 illustrates the use of RailDax for conceptual, strategic and tactical planning of railway services and operations, leading to an annual timetable. Other exchange formats will be more suited for the exchange of network and timetable data for public (customers') travel planning and ticketing solutions.

Figure 1 — RailDax as a railway data exchange format for conceptual, strategic and tactical planning

RailDax is not intended as a data exchange format for applications serving the following purposes:

1) asset development and maintenance applications for infrastructure and rolling stock;
2) public travel plan and fare management.

The interface between RailDax and purpose 2) will typically be the annual timetable.

Train operators can be legally obliged to publish in other formats, for example in Europe, the Network Timetable Exchange (NeTEx) for public travel plan and fare management, and Telematics Applications for Passenger services (TAP) and Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSI) for slot ordering at national access points. The relationship between RailDax and these specifications is explained in Annex A.

When launching the RailDax project it was deemed necessary to base the format on a mature (proven in use) data exchange language and to cover the RailDax use cases. Based on a study, railML 2.x was chosen. For the same reason, RaiDax is developed as a pair to railML version 2.5. The development of possible future revisions of RailDax may be considered to pair with later railML versions or other formats.

PD ISO/TS 4398:2022

Intelligent transport systems. Guided transportation service planning data exchange

Current, Under Review

Published:

30 Nov 2022